Gadgetopia

The Story of the PING Program: Finally, the guy who wrote the ping utility backs up my eternal assertion that it was named for the sonar similartiy, and not for some stupid acronym that no one remembers. I always knew this, but people kept trying to correct me.

From my point of view PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it’s a sonar analogy. However, I’ve heard second-hand that Dave Mills offered this expansion of the name, so perhaps we’re both right. Sheesh, and I thought the government was bad about expanding acronyms! :-)

Besides that, the author reveals some other information about how and why he wrote ping, and offers the original source code.

Pings blocked by your firewall? This is handy.